Freelance Website and Media design

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with Sunnyside Farm to develop their new website and online shop. Sunnyside produce a range of rare-breed meats on a small scale, putting welfare and quality of life above bottom line profits - they’re a company after my own heart, and it’s been a joy working with them.

The website is a custom-themed WordPress install, with WP eCommerce and Google Checkout handling online shopping and payment processing respectively. As usual, there’s a few tricks with jQuery and custom php scripting to enhance the UX and search engine visibility, and a bit of CSS tinkering to make full-screen backgrounds work on mobile browsers.

Technologies: Wordpress, WP eCommerce, jQuery, xhtml, css

Solway Insulation is a new launch this month - a fairly simple but attractive site for a company which is fast-expanding in the region. The man in charge of this particular company was one of my first clients, from way back in 2002: doesn’t time fly.

This is a first outing for Unify, which is a fairly nifty bit of database-free content editing software which lets the client edit the site in a wysiwyg format, without altering the overall structure of the site. We’re still working out how to make this run with include files and friendly URL strucures, but it looks like a potentially useful bit of software for the future.

Technologies: CSS, xHTML, PHP, Unify.

I’ve been working with JBA Seed Potatoes a lot this month, building new systems and functionality into their front-end website and stock control systems. This is one of the sites we’ve recently launched: Seed Potato Merchants, a new channel to market for the company.

We had to do some tricky Javascript and jQuery work to make the user interface a bit more friendly - there’s a lot of data being pushed at the user here - and quite a lot of preparation to make the existing (ASP) back end systems work with the new (PHP) front end.

We’re now going to work on taking all the new features we’ve built - including customer accounts and order tracking - and work this back into some more projects for the company, which should continue to keep us busy…

It’s been a bit quiet round here of late, the reason being that I’ve just been far too busy to update. Which isn’t best practice, I know, but it’s been a bit crazy of late.

I’ve just launched a couple of new sites in the last couple of weeks:

Thermal Image Surveys is a new offshoot from the ecoInsulate family, offering - as the name would suggest - thermal imaging surveys for domestic and commercial users. We built a heavily customised Wordpress system, shunning the standard template system to craft a new front end which supports multiple columns, friendly URL structures, and client-editable meta data: a totally custom front end with the stability of a Wordpress backend system. I’ll be interested to see how it performs in SEO terms.

We’ve also just set up a nice simple site for Joy Jack Interior Design. Joy has been working in the region for almost 30 years, and wanted a simple, minimal design to show off her interior design work, which we launched earlier this month.

There’s a whole host of other work on the books at the moment, including some serious new developments for JBA, a fun creative video project, and a couple of other websites which I can’t talk about until they launch!

I’m now booked up with freelance work until July, so unfortunately I can’t take on any other design contracts until this time, although I’m happy to advise as a consultant, and provide hosting/email services. As always, the best thing is to get in touch.

Launched this month is the new site for ecoInsulate Ltd, an environmentally friendly insulation company. The company has a pretty cool insulation system which is water-based and chemical-free: apparently one of the most efficient insulation systems on the market today.

We wanted to develop something that stood out a bit, so built a visual around the ‘Morning, Noon and Night’ slogan: some PHP/Javascript wizardry built a system which changes the look of the site depending on the time a user visits (you can bypass this by clicking on the little icons at the top of the page).

A nice little project, and one which we’re hoping should bring in lots of new business for this up-and-coming company.

After a long development cycle, we finally launched JBA Seed Potatoes today. I’ve been working with JBA for a good three years now, building the original website and doing loads of design work for them over the years.

The new site matches the branding we worked on back in August and is complimented with a new Guide which I worked on with Hoggett Creative over the autumn. We kept a few styling tweaks from the original JBA website but built a whole new organisational system in the back end to make updates easier, and streamlined the ordering process using a new user flow and liberal use of Javascript for client interaction.

We’ll be working together in the new year to roll out updates as an ongoing project, so keep an eye out for more exciting developments in the tuber world…

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my clients, past and present!

I’ve been working on a client database for a long-term customer for the past few weeks. I can’t give out too many details on the project for data sensitivity issues, but the database is built to let the company access client data fast and securely online.

It’s been built on a MySQL database with two layers of password protection for security, and uses jQuery effects to speed up user interaction time. An interesting project, all in.

we recently launched the new site for deliberate, a london-based pr company with an impressive client list. we took the original flash design and translated it into standards-compliant xhtml/css, before polishing it up with a few wee jquery effects. a fun little job: looking forward to working with benjamin and co again soon.

the carers’ centre website launched this month - a joint collaboration with the princess trust for carers and abbey group. it’s a uk-wide resource for unpaid carers, to let them know more about available benefits, and allowing them to network with other professionals in the industry. traffic is looking fairly amazing already.

a new addition to the portfolio is hytek cars in dumfries. we carried out a facelift and some usability upgrades on the site, using its existing backend system but cleaning up frontend content: you can see a comparison between old and new here.

hytek’s site is built using drupal: a bit of a baptism of fire was had to get it all up and running, but it’s quite a nice system once you’re used to it. some heavy reading was involved in the run-up to launch!

this is the first site to run on our brand new spangly ubuntu linux server, which is running in parallel to our existing windows box. a bit of adjustment required to get used to using a command-line interface only: /etc/apache ls and all that…